Subject: Why LOOKUPP

From: "G. Allen Morris III" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 00:48:52 -0700

I don't see any need for the LOOKUPP operation.

Is the purpose of this to keep the client from having to 
cache the filehandle for each path elemnt?

Or is there some more subtle need for it?

If the client is caching the filehandles of each element of the
path then doing a PUTFH with the parent filehandle would seem to 
be the way to get to the parent directory.

This is an operation the a lot of filesystems will have a hard time
dealing with.  They just don't have parent directories.

[Someone will talk about volatile filehandles here, but they are
not a very good solution: if the name of any element of the path
has changed the lookup will fail.]

If this operation is really vital wouldn't it be just as clean
to us LOOKUP with some special argument.  I would think that
LOOKUP "" could be used.

---------------------------------
       G. Allen Morris III